The gaze is enhanced by unfamiliar surroundings, the brain searches for recognizable anchors in the unknown. Houses look like houses, but the shadows are sharper and the colours are intrusive. The streets are full of holes and in the windowsills the potted plants have turned into trees.The skeletons of the buildings are exposed, and the statue has fallen over. The city is crumbling and the decay is advancing.
I wake up in the hotel in Havana in the town of Vadado, a privileged guest in search of adventures. The heat, the beach – and rum.

Strategically we avoid the worst tourist traps and dance steps, and attempt to get an insight into the last bastion of communism.
It will soon end – they say, and we should visit before it is over.
Cuba is history in the making.

Jeanette Land Schou, born in Copenhagen, lives in Malmö
www.jeanettelandschou.dk

JLS has a degree in art, art theory and communication from the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.
JLS are an experienced teacher of digital media in artschools. She has been involved in a number of artist-run exhibition spaces. Apart from her own practice, she has been involved in making photo and video productions for musicians and other visual artists.

JLS have throughout her practice worked with video art and photography, and she has presented her work in several exhibitions in Denmark and abroad; group shows as well as solo presentations. She has published a number of photobooks presenting her own work, and is presently active as the chairman and a curator in Skånes Konstförening in Malmö, and in the Malmö Photobiennial.

In her photographic work she is mainly concerned with the landscape as a psycho-iconographic material. But she has also been focusing on the genre of the Still Life with its inherent theme of memento mori, or as a universe in miniature.